In march 1936, Brazil's Fascist government seized twenty-eight-year-old Olga Benario and her lover, the legendary Communist guerrilla leader Luis Carlos Prestes. After six months in prison, and heavily pregnant, Olga, a German Jew, is classified 'extremely dangerous' and exported to her native Germany. Olga, Revolutionary and Martyr tells the extraordinary tale of this heroic life. From Olga's communist activist roots in Germany as a young woman to Moscow where she flees after persecution from the German Police. It traces her astounding political acumen as she is put in charge of escorting Luis Carlos Prestes to Brazil to lead the Communist Revolution of 1935, and follows her discovery of both political and personal harmony with Prestes when on the journey the two fall in love. When the revolution fails and Olga is deported she is quickly imprisoned by the Gestapo who miraculously allow her to keep her daughter, Anita, with her until she is 14 months old, when she is rescued by her grandmother, now desperate for the release of both mother and child. Olga, however, remains imprisoned, and is transferred from the Gestapo's women's prison to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where, in February 1942 she is executed in the gas chambers at Bernburg. Award-winning Brazilian journalist Fernando Morais creates a stunning historical portrait of this great revolutionary genius and her short, turbulent, and passionate life.
